Deep Space Network
The Deep Space Network (or DSN) is NASA's group of large antennae at three stations around world. They are at Madrid, California, and Canberra, about 120 degrees apart around the Earth. They communicate with satellites and probes in space. The antennas are also used as radio telescopes to learn about stars and other natural things in space. The DSN is NASA’s international array of giant radio antennas. It supports interplanetary spacecraft missions, plus a few that orbit Earth. It also provides radar and radio astronomy observations that improve the understanding of the solar system and the larger universe.[1]
According to NASA, "The antennas of the Deep Space Network are the indispensable link to explorers venturing beyond Earth. They provide the crucial connection for commanding our spacecraft and receiving their never-before-seen images and scientific information on Earth, propelling our understanding of the universe, our solar system and ultimately, our place within it."[1]
The placement of these sites allow communication with spacecraft as our planet rotates.
Communications and navigation are fundamental to robotic spacecraft exploration. NASA spacecraft communicates via radio links with antennas in the deep space network (DSN) located in California, Australia, and Spain. Measurements of range between the DSN and spacecraft are an important and sometimes critical contribution to navigation. For a given pair of uplink and downlink carriers, ranging must generally be accompanied by telemetering, in order to allow for efficient use of spacecraft and ground resources. Regenerative ranging, which is compatible with the simultaneous presence of telemetry, is more efficient in the use of link power than is the current standard (nonregenerative) ranging. This improved efficiency arises because regenerative ranging replaces the wideband filter found in a nonregenerative transponder's ranging channel with a narrowband loop that tracks the range code, so the signal-to-noise ratio in the transponder's ranging channel is large and there is essentially no noise modulated onto the downlink carrier. This paper offers a comparison of pseudonoise (PN) regenerative ranging versus the nonregenerative method of ranging. This paper also describes the implementation of PN regenerative ranging on the Iris transponder, which is a low-power, 0.5U size, DSN-compatible, software-defined radio based on various JPL flight transponder designs. Iris is baselined to be used on 7 out of 13 of the CubeSats flying as secondary payloads on the Space Launch System Exp
The design of the Pirarucu mission has been undertaken by a team of undergraduates students at the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University for the NASA/NIA 2015 Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts — Academic Linkage (RASC-AL) competition. The team has completed a design iteration up to the equivalent of a mission concept review (MCR). Pirarucu is a Discovery class mission for prospecting Martian moons Phobos and Deimos. The concept is centered on a LADEE-like mothership that carries a set of twelve 12U Cube-Sats. The mothership is equipped with a suite of instruments similar to those on the Curiosity and the 2020 Mars rover, and is capable of performing laser spectroscopy, geological mapping, and chemical analysis of regolith samples. The mothership also serves as a telecommunication hub with the NASA Deep Space Network (DSN) and communicates directly with the CubeSats on a common data link (CDL) architecture implemented with L3 Communications Net-T technologies. The 12U CubeSats explore the surface of the moon and collect surface samples to be returned to the mothership for analysis. The CubeSats are split into two teams, one team can perform in-situ surface science and the other retrieves samples for analysis on the mothership. Both CubeSat teams can be refueled by the mothership and thus are able to perform multiple excursions to the moon for surface science and sample collection to ensure analysis of a variety of sites on the surfaces of the moons.
High-speed information processing technologies being developed and applied by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for NASA and Department of Defense mission needs have potential dual-uses in telemedicine and other medical applications. Fiber optic ground networks connected with microwave satellite links allow NASA to communicate with its astronauts in Earth orbit or on the moon, and with its deep space probes billions of miles away. These networks monitor the health of astronauts and or robotic spacecraft. Similar communications technology will also allow patients to communicate with doctors anywhere on Earth. NASA space missions have science as a major objective. Science sensors have become so sophisticated that they can take more data than our scientists can analyze by hand. High performance computers--workstations, supercomputer and massively parallel computers are being used to transform this data into knowledge. This is done using image processing, data visualization and other techniques to present the data--one's and zero's in forms that a human analyst can readily relate to and understand. Medical sensors have also explored in the in data output--witness CT scans, MRI, and ultrasound. This data must be presented in visual form and computers will allow routine combination of many two dimensional MRI images into three dimensional reconstructions of organs that then can be fully examined by physicians. Emerging technologies such as neural networks that are being "trained" to detect craters on planets or incoming missiles amongst decoys can be used to identify microcalcification in mammograms.
On July 25, an initial onsite inspection by the NASA Madrid Deep Space Communications Complex (MDSCC) emergency response team found wildfire damage primarily to pavement and surrounding vegetation, with no significant structural damage observed to antennas or buildings.… pic.twitter.com/WvrspnBW6z —
Everything we examined (5)
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